Posts published by Beth Kissileff

I never went on a college tour when I was a teenager. My parents wanted me to attend the college where my father was employed; it would have been tuition-free for me, and so they weren’t eager to encourage other explorations.

Before I left on a recent college trip with my daughter I had believed these college visits yet another unnecessary aspect of the lives of privileged children. I thought the college tour was yet another accoutrement without value in itself, but only as something to brag about.

However, while with my oldest child, Tova, on a four-day, six-campus jaunt, I came to appreciate that one can’t know what one wants until one sees it.

I love to browse physical stores. When a book’s title catches my eye, I peruse the table of contents and see who the author thanks in his acknowledgements. This, I then realize, is what I must read next.

The book wouldn’t have occurred to me at all until I saw it. When I am in a store, I can pick up an object, try on a piece of clothing to check the color, the feel of the fabric, and most importantly the fit.

That seems to be the most overused word in the college search process: fit. But the college tour, my daughter and I have found, is a helpful way to try the campus out for size.

This is our advice to parents and students embarking on the college tour.Read more…

Beth Kissileff has taught at Carleton, Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, and the Universities of Minnesota and Pittsburgh. She is the editor of a forthcoming anthology: “Reading Genesis” (Continuum Books, 2013).

Parenting would be so much easier if we could just give our children the fruits of all our hard-earned experience, and they would accept it, and go off on their young lives using our middle-aged knowledge as their template.

But of course there are many things that each person just has to learn for him or herself out of toil and agony; no amount of those items on a parents’ life list will change what a child knows.

If I could just pass my own experiences on, as I did my genes, I would let my college applicant daughter know: rejection is a process. You apply, get rejected, improve the application, and reapply elsewhere or differently.

Rejection isn’t a bad thing or something to be afraid of. It is part of life, something everyone, no matter how successful or talented, will experience. Read more…